• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI Linux Users Get Excited For Catalyst 10.10

    In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu’s kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.

    The Catalyst 10.9 driver does not offer support for X.Org Server 1.9, which is used by Ubuntu 10.10, so in late September AMD had sent over an early Catalyst 10.10 driver to Canonical that offers “early look” support for this xorg-server that reached a stable status in August. Those running Ubuntu 10.10 and enabling the proprietary ATI/AMD support are using this driver.

  • New Ubuntu Support Site Debuts

    Just in time for the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) release, Stack Exchange has introduced a new website, called askubuntu.com, dedicated to Q&A for Ubuntu users, developers and partners.

Applications

• Storage DBAN, Disksposal and Diskpensation

  Listed at number ten in Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools a few weeks ago, you had what was perhaps your first glimpse of Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disk wiping utility. Today, you have it in glorious 3D* action that’s sure to convince you to add DBAN to your utility belt as you head to the inner sanctum of your local data center.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Replace Outlook Webmail with Open Source Zarafa

  • MySQL Admin Cookbook

  • 4 Archiving Tools for Linux Server Admins

  • Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

  • Running Multiple MySQL Server Instances in Parallel on a Linux Server

  • How To Set Up WebDAV With Apache2 On Ubuntu 10.04

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Zenwalk 6.4 review

    With all the hype surrounding mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora, it’s easy to forget that there are quite a few other excellent distros out there. Case in point – Zenwalk. As Dmitri Popov discovers it’s a great way to give your old hardware a new lease of life…

• New Releases

  • Absolute 13.1.6

• Debian Family

  • 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years

    If you’re using Debian, you know that this distribution is built entirely by volunteers that form a very diverse community. And you could be part of it. But why should you do that? I can’t tell for you but I can share my own experience. It’s been 12 years since I joined Debian and I’m going to tell you what keeps me on board.

  • Skolelinux- An educational subset of Debian for schools

    The Skolelinux / Debian Edu project is the result of an effort that started out as independent projects orcestrated by many different groups from different regions of Europe and these days, all over the world.

  • Debian’s developer dilemma: Why Debian should vote “yes”

    The Debian project is, in many ways, a model example of how an open source project should be run. Its Social Contract, Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), and Constitution have served the project well and influenced many other substantial FOSS projects when it comes to project governance.

    But voting rights are restricted to developers, or at least that’s the impression most people get when looking through the process to become a Debian Developer. It’s not that the project explicitly disallows non-developers membership, it’s that the path to becoming a voting member (Debian Developer) is practically hard-coded to require a contributor to maintain packages or do some kind of development. Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli put forward a General Resolution to welcome non-packaging contributors to Debian. A similar proposal came up in 2008, but was tabled for further discussion.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Final Review

      As planned, Ubuntu 10.10 (codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”) was released yesterday, October 10th, 2010. Canonical usually releases closer to month end, but in this case it was a good opportunity to make it coincide with such a significant date. Ubuntu 10.10 was released on 10/10/10.

    • System 76 Starling netbooks won’t ship with ‘slow, confusing’ Ubuntu Unity

    • Ubuntu 10.10: date with destiny missed

      The first thing you’ll notice on a fresh install of 10.10 is the installer has once again been revamped, though the changes are for the most part cosmetic. The various slides that give new users information about Ubuntu have been tweaked and some menus appear to have changed. Unfortunately, the actual install process proceeds as usual – a fact that means dumping everything onto a single partition.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop i386 USB image

      Good old Ubuntu. Five years on, and still not offering an image that can be written to a USB stick and booted from.

      I really thought this time the Ubuntu overlords would have seen that tiny crack in the armor, and done something about it. But looking over the download page, it seems like it’s still something nobody has mentioned.

    • Nice themes for ubuntu 10.10 (maverick meerkat) users

    • Ubuntu 10.10: 12 reasons to try it now

      As Ubuntu 10.10, or “Maverick Meerkat,” hits the streets this Sunday, it’s a pretty safe bet that legions of existing Ubuntu users will be updating to the new release. After all, it looks to be Canonical’s most user-friendly Ubuntu Linux yet, and many of the new features promise to be must-haves.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Mythbuntu 10.10 is here!

        Mythbuntu 10.10 has been released. With this release, we are providing mirroring on sponsored mirrors and torrents. It is very important to note that this release is only compatible with MythTV 0.23.1 systems. Previous Mythbuntu releases can be upgraded to a compatible version with the builds located athttp://www.mythbuntu.org/auto-builds. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

Devices/Embedded

• Energy-efficient NAS server shares USB drives

  Synology began shipping a diskless network-attached storage (NAS) server designed for use with USB storage devices. The USB Station 2 incorporates an 800MHz processor, supports up to 4TB of external storage via dual USB 2.0 ports, includes gigabit Ethernet port, and offers file sharing and multimedia streaming via Synology’s Linux-based, DLNA/UPnP-ready DiskStation Manager 3.0 software.

• Phones

  • Android

    • First look at Acer Aspire One D255 with Android

      The Android implementation on Acer’s recently launched dual-boot netbooks feels more like a technology preview than a usable product. It is buggy and inextensible, with no possibility to install extra applications from the Android Market or any other repository. As such, it is limited to basic tasks, such as Internet browsing, web interaction, image viewing and media playback. It’s hard to say who the product is intended for – the Windows crowd will take one quick look and never boot into it again, while any Linux geek will surely prefer a proper Linux distribution or one of the netbook-oriented variants. Perhaps the only positive point is that by providing a Linux-based alternative on its netbooks, Acer was forced to build these computers from Linux-friendly hardware components, so there are no unwelcome surprises when it comes to hardware support.

      Of course, this is Acer’s first attempt at delivering an Android-powered netbook, so one can understand the difficulties of creating a workable solution from something that is much more suited to running on smaller handheld devices with touchscreens. Still, the manufacturer is guilty for making very little effort at customising the product for a 10-inch screen or, indeed, for not choosing to dual-boot Windows with a proper Linux distribution that would be so much more suitable for running on the netbook. Perhaps Acer will realise its mistake and provide a better Android implementation for its next release or it might even deliver online updates that would address some of the bugs and inconveniences. Unfortunately, by that time my Acer netbook will be running a real, full-featured Linux operating system, instead of this bizarre Windows XP/Android combination.

    • Amazon.com leads pack of new Android app stores

      Amazon.com will soon offer an Android app store to compete with Google’s Android market, a second industry report has confirmed. The effort joins Verizon’s recent Android-ready V Cast Apps store, as well as an Android “app-pack” service announced last week by Sprint.

      Want to set up shop and sell mobile applications? There’s a platform for that: the Android operating system Google unleashed to the open source community. And companies are taking advantage of the search engine’s largesse.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Ubuntu 10.10 arrives with impressive new netbook environment

    Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu 10.10, a major update of the popular Linux distribution. The new version introduces the Unity netbook environment, which offers a custom desktop shell that is optimized for ease of use on small displays and has a global menubar to conserve vertical screen space.

Piracy and Free Software

Over the last few years, many advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the banner of piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace advocates of piracy as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? I believe that, unintuitively, if we take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced “middle ground” response to piracy is possible. On free culture and free software’s terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an shortsighted and unwise way to try to promote sharing that we should not support.

Would you hire an open source developer?

One very important skill that you learn or improve in an open source community is to express yourself clearly in written form. The mailing lists or forums that we use are very limited compared to in-person communications, and extra care is required to get your message through. Being concise and complete, disagreeing respectfully, avoiding personal attacks and coping with what you perceive as personal attacks are all extremely useful skills on the job. Useful skills for your whole life actually.

Once you master asynchronous written discussions as a way to build group consensus, doing the same in a face to face meeting can be much easier. But the basic skills are the same, so what you learn in an open source community definitely helps.

Open source comes of age?

Say “open source software” to most people and they’ll conjure up an image of an alpha geek hunched over a keyboard, doing complicated things with command line interfaces. ‘All very well for the geeks,’ they think, ‘but not for ordinary mortals, and certainly too risky for my business.’

In fact, open source software (OSS) is already ubiquitous in all sorts of places. For one thing, it runs most of the world’s Web servers, probably including yours. Apache has around 55% of the total world market share for Web servers, rising to 66% for the million busiest sites, compared to just 17% for its nearest rival, Microsoft. And it’s held that leading position since 1996.

Events

• Touring the Balkans to promote Free Software

  James Michael Dupont (Mike) is a software developer that is doing a lot to promote Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in Kosovo and other Balkan countries. This year, Mike invited a first class team to spend a couple of weeks in the southern Balkans, to explain why and how FOSS can play a great role in the social and economic development of those countries. The team included (I’m only naming those I met personally) Gnash developer Rob Savoye, technology historian Peter Salus, former member of the X.org Board of Directors Leon Shiman and LibreDwg developer Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva.

  I attended the first and final parts of the tour, that is the two conferences FreeSB (Free Software in Balkans) and SFK10 (Software Freedom Kosova 2010). All the guys mentioned above gave really great talks that you can find (both slideshows and video!) on the conference websites. A few , only apparently “minor” talks that I found very relevant for t

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Please Mozilla, Let Me Disable Firefox Panorama

    I may be a bit old fashioned when it comes to changes in new versions of my favorite web browser Firefox. This can be partly attributed to years of working with a particular feature, only to find it completely revamped in a new version. Don’t get me wrong, if a feature makes sense from a usability point of view I’m all for it. But the Firefox developers lately seem to have concentrated much of their energy on making changes to the graphical user interface and the user’s interaction with the browser.

Oracle

• New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.3 Beta (part 1)

  Did you know about these new Chart features in OOo 3.3 Beta?

Business

• Build, buy or open source?

  Carbone believes building with open source software often makes software development more costly, error prone and slower to market. “Buying software offers faster time to market, portability to other hardware platforms, integrated components and the availability of support from the supplier. A proven solution with a strong track record of adoption and successful use can reduce risk of failure, just as using modern mcus saves time and reduces hardware cost.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU MDK 1.2.6 released

  A new bug fix release, 1.2.6, is out.

Fund-raising and self-publishing (the open source way), Part two

Two online publishing companies that provide no additional barriers to users of open source software stacks (aside from the possible use of Flash) are CreateSpace (owned by Amazon) and Lulu . Both will get your publication listed on Amazon (if that is your goal), both feature copious written instructions and peer discussion (especially helpful to first-time authors), and neither requires any up-front payment.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Honour killings: Saved from India’s caste system by the Love Commandos

  A spate of brutal killings in northern India has spurred a group of volunteers to set up a helpline to rescue couples whose lives are in danger because they want to marry across caste lines

Finance

• Florida’s Kangaroo Foreclosure Courts: Judges Denying Due Process on Behalf of Banks

  Florida is ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. In addition to being one of the epicenters of the housing meltdown, it has also become the jurisdiction where local lawyers have been the most effective overall in unearthing how servicers and foreclosure mills have engaged in widespread document fabrications and use of improper affidavits to foreclose.

• Foreclosures Slow as Document Flaws Emerge

  Defense lawyers say the disclosures are symptomatic of the carelessness, if not outright fraud, that lenders have been exhibiting for years in their rush to file cases. Many necessary documents have disappeared, with defense lawyers saying the lenders often do not even have standing to foreclose.

• Citigroup, Ally Sued for Racketeering Over Database

  The homeowners claim the defendants filed or caused to be filed mortgages with forged signatures, filed foreclosure actions months before they acquired any legal interest in the properties and falsely claimed to own notes executed with mortgages.

  The lawsuit is one of multiple cases against MERS and banks alleging that the process allows wrongful foreclosures. Several of these cases, combined in a multidistrict litigation in Phoenix, were dismissed Sept. 30, with the judge allowing the plaintiffs to re-file their complaints.

• At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture

  Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.

• `Black Swan’ Author Says Investors Should Sue Nobel for Crisis

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” said investors who lost money in the financial crisis should sue the Swedish Central Bank for awarding the Nobel Prize to economists whose theories he said brought down the global economy.

• How technology is contributing to economic chaos

  Earlier last September, Europe erupted in protest. (About time!) Tens of thousands of workers went on strike! From rail road workers to truckers. This resulted in serious disruption of everyday life in Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and more. The governments of the world think that cutting the average worker’s pay, pensions and raising taxes on them will correct the massive deficits.

  But, these deficits were not caused by the workers or average Joe! They were caused by Bankers and Policy Makers (Politicians). In October 2008, the world witnessed America’s stock market crash. The result of which took months and months to determine whom was to blame. First, it was blamed on real estate brokers. But, it was soon found that everyone in the financial industry from bankers, brokers, insurance agencies and even home owners tapping into equity they thought they could pay back, where all found to be part of the problem.

  You can blame any number of institutions. But, it is clear it was orchestrated by major Banks and Policy Makers. The Politicians ‘in bed’ with the bankers created polices over the years that ultimately supported the ultra rich and not anyone else.

• Take Action! Demand a Freeze on Foreclosures!

  DON’T THINK THIS DOES NOT AFFECT YOU! Unemployment is now driving foreclosures. Flooding the housing market with illegal foreclosures hurts everyone’s property values and unfairly denies people an opportunity to save their homes from foreclosure. It’s time to finally stop this madness and hold the nation’s biggest banks accountable for their detestable actions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Corporate Cash Floods US Congressional Elections

  Big business and the wealthy are pouring unprecedented sums of money into the US congressional elections, according to data reported in the media over the past several days. While the lion’s share of the money is going to candidates of the Republican Party, Democrats are also raking in millions, underscoring the status of both parties as political instruments of the financial aristocracy.

  Much of the spending is fueled by the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, handed down in January, which reversed 80 years of precedent and declared that corporations—as well as labor unions—had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of their favored candidates.

  While individuals and organizations are limited in what they can give directly to a candidate, there is no limit on what they can spend on their own, as long as the advertising is not directly coordinated with the candidate.

• Larry Kudlow Calls for Campaign Ad Funding Disclosure

  The push for disclosure follows exposure of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s possible use of funds from foreign companies and governments to finance political attack ads in the U.S., and Republicans’ success at blocking consideration of the DISCLOSE Act in September. The Act would prevent foreign influence in elections, enhance financial disclosures for advertising, and make CEOs and other leaders take responsibility for financing political ads.

• How “Breast Cancer Awareness” Campaigns Hurt

  Because female breasts are sexy, and sex sells. Lungs and other organs — and their cancers — just don’t have the same zing. Lung cancer may be the country’s number one cancer killer, but people are unlikely to flock to buy weird and inappropriate “lung cancer awareness” products like a colored “lung cancer awareness” hand gun, a “colon-cancer awareness” floating beer pong table or a bile-colored “pancreatic awareness” toaster. Lungs, pancreases, colons, prostates and other hard-working internal organs are just plain unattractive marketing tools — they don’t sell stuff. They are asexual, and hidden, and we like them that way. Not so with breasts. Female breasts conjure up buying power like few other organs, and the “breast cancer awareness” theme gives corporate America a legitimate “in” to link female breasts to sales of just about anything — a winning combination for marketing purposes.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Argument preview: Protest vs. privacy

• Local attorney jailed for not saying Pledge

  We talked to another attorney about this issue. He said if Lampley did not want to say the pledge he had that constitutional right.

  “You have a right to speak, and you have a right to remain silent. So I was shocked when I heard a lawyer had been put in jail. It doesn’t make any difference whether you agree with him or not it’s his constitutional right,” attorney Jim Waide said.

  Lampley said he hopes he and Judge Talmadge Littlejohn will be able to come to a resolution.

• Making Congress All It Can Be

  In Justice Breyer’s view, democracy is best served when the court maintains “a strong workable relationship with Congress,” a partnership in which the court interprets statutes so as to help Congress achieve its legislative goals, unarticulated or even as coyly concealed as those goals may be. Why should that be? Here is Justice Breyer’s explanation:

  “The more the court seeks realistically to ascertain the purposes of a statute and interprets its provisions in ways that further those purposes, the harder it will be for the legislator to escape responsibility for the statute’s objectives, and the easier it will be for voters to hold their legislators responsible for their legislative decisions.” By contrast, when the court, deliberately oblivious to context and purpose, simply goes by the statute’s text, however inartful, “the easier it will be for legislators to avoid responsibility for a badly written statute simply by saying that the court reached results they did not favor.”

• Kyrgyzstan election aims to bring democracy to central Asian nation

  Kyrgyzstan was today holding a landmark election that is likely to establish the country as the first parliamentary democracy in authoritarian central Asia. Thousands of Kyrgyz voters went to the polls to elect a new parliament following a violent year that saw a street revolution in April and savage ethnic riots in the south of the country in June.

• The death knell for Morocco’s free press

  Leading Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi has difficulty speaking about Nichane, the vibrant Arabic-language news magazine he started four years ago, in the past tense. A passionate advocate for secularism, gender equity and individual rights and a vociferous critic of Islamist ideologies, Benchemsi was forced last Friday to close Nichane after major state-owned corporations subjected it to an advertising boycott that drove down revenues by almost 80%.

• Liu Xiaobo Nobel win prompts Chinese fury

  China’s best-known dissident, Liu Xiaobo, today won the Nobel peace prize from the prison cell where he is serving 11 years for incitement to subvert state power.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Why Imitation Gets A Bad Rap… And Why Companies Need To Be More Serious About Copying

  Where the book really shines, in my opinion, is in Chapter 4, where it details the massive successes and failures of copycatting in two key industries: airlines and discount retail. In that chapter, Shenkar looks at the success of Southwest Air, which “imitated” the failed People Express, but figured out how to do discount air travel while avoiding a few key elements that resulted in People Express’ failure. He then goes through a variety of other airlines and how they tried to mimic Southwest Air, covering many examples of both success and failure, and explaining why some succeeded where others failed. Most notable, perhaps, was the dismal failure of pretty much every single attempt by the big airlines to copy Southwest. They all appeared to copy the superficial aspects of it — the key things that everyone knew about — without quite grasping the underlying structural reasons why Southwest succeeded, thereby setting up a business model in conflict with itself. It’s yet another fantastic reminder that the idea that big companies can just come in and copy what some innovator does is quite frequently not really true.

• Copyrights

  • Record companies lose, artists gain

    In early September, two of my M.Sc. students handed in their thesis, which has created quite a stir in the Norwegian music industry. I think this has applicability outside Norway, so here is a translation (and light edit) of the Norwegian-language press release and a link to the full link to the full report (PDF, 3,4Mb)

  • Facebook Fails At The DMCA: Promises To Restore Counter-Noticed Content, But Doesn’t [Updated]

    This is part of how the DMCA works. If the user files a counternotice, and if the copyright holder does not file a lawsuit within 10 to 14 business days, the service provider can put the works back up. Now, some say that service providers are required to restore the material, while the text of the statute is a bit more ambiguous. In theory, a service provider could opt not to restore the materials for other reasons. However, in this case, none of that matters, as Facebook appears to have promised that it would “replace or cease disabling access” within 10 to 14 business days.

  • “Free Music Is Always Going To Win,” Says Lee Parsons, CEO of Ditto Music; Interview Part 1

    Lee Parsons: Record companies cannot look into problems from a fresh, artist based angle. Problems are often solved but not in the way they were intended. For instance, Facebook began decades ago as a printed manual of College students and faculty. Through the expansion of Web 2.0 itself, a consummate of available web technologies and techniques, this became the phenomenon it is today. It could well be the future of music, we don’t know.

    Shawn Fanning created Napster firstly for his own purpose. The new music models embrace as much technology and revolution as they can contain in a chaotic attempt to find a new and better path. Revolutionaries are prepared to make mistakes on the way; labels do not have this luxury. Many battles win a war, likewise through constant chaotic growth, development will come. Developing a new model for a major label is fuelled with risk so it is more likely they will continue to look for ways of containing technological advancement rather than embracing it as a new way of income.

  • Spotify crashes into Apple on way to U.S.

    These are some swinging Swedes, the guys at Spotify.

    Founded in Stockholm in 2006, Spotify is is an online streaming music service that has already conquered Europe with the help of a revolutionary desktop service and now desperately wants to make the jump to the United States.

    And it’s probably safe to say many American music fans want that to happen too. Yet, despite immense anticipation for the service here, the company has already failed to meet two promised launch dates. The new self-imposed deadline is for the end of the year. Spotify managers say that by then they’ll finally have licensing deals in place with the four largest record labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The HeliOS Project – How We Did It

If you use anything but Linux and the associated applications, you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’. The few Windows machines we have put out resulted in virus and malware calls within a week of delivery. We have made a new custom distro derived from Ubuntu 10.04 using a great program called UCK.

A Mac User’s Opinion of Linux

Good Business

Dave Richards wrote that IT maintenance costs were seriously lower using GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. He published numbers. I think he understated the advantages of GNU/Linux. In my own work I have seen schools increase five-fold the number of seats going to GNU/Linux with a decrease in man-hours spent on maintenance. Here the last two XP machines cost as many man-hours as the seventy-five GNU/Linux boxes. The reason? Nothing seems to keep working on them, not even the anti-malware or automatic updates.

Server

• Reason to Celebrate at M$

  FreeBSD did very well as usual and so did GNU/Linux, 27 in the top 42, and six in the top ten.

Audiocasts/Shows

• KDEMU – Jonathan Riddell for Kubuntu 10.10

Ballnux

• Samsung hails Galaxy Tab charity donation plan

  Buy the £600 gadget from now until the end of November and Samsung will give a tenner to charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Applications

• Linux and Windows Integration with Virtualbox

  I reached the conclusion that there should have been a better way to use my PC and I looked for a solution that would allow to access both Linux and Windows applications without rebooting.

  I investigated some of the available products. I found that the wine or CodeWeavers Crossover supported most common Windows applications, but some other ones would not work. VMWare looked interesting, but I preferred to use until recently Win4Lin (originally developed by Netraverse to support only Windows 95, 98 or ME and later upgraded by Virtual Bridges to support also Windows 2000 and Windows XP) but this product is no longer upgraded and supported,

• Moovida Melancholy

• GnuCash COULD be a Quickbooks killer

  I am a certified Quickbooks technician. And, to be perfectly honest, Quickbooks stinks. When it works it’s great…but when it doesn’t work, it’s a NIGHTMARE! It’s terribly sensitive to network hiccups, it isn’t smart enough to switch itself out of single user mode after a scheduled backup, it’s slow, it constantly can not find data files, it’s expensive…the list goes on and on. And I hear these complaints nearly every day. Along with those complaints comes the question: “Do you know of an alternative?” The answer to that question is always, unfortunately, “No”.

• ICINGA – An advanced opensource monitoring tool | Nagios fork

  To ensure the continuous development of the popular monitoring software Nagios, a group of active, long standing Nagios community supporters have decided to fork Nagios and open its development to a broader base. Unfortunately this had to be done under a new name: Icinga.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to password protect files and folders in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

  • Linux text to speech with Festival

  • How to remove Vmware from Linux | FAQ

  • Perl upgrade from cpan shell

  • Install Gnome Nanny Parental Control On Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”

  • How to remove Vmware from Linux | FAQ

  • How to run commands in the background

  • Working Broadcom wireless in Kubuntu live session

  • Customizing Ubuntu 10.10 with a dock, new icon theme, effects, global menu and more

  • How to get the high resolution back for tty after activation of nVidia driver in Ubuntu

  • Tools of the week: Delete files securely on Linux

  • How to Install Ailurus in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverik) – A Useful Ubuntu Tweak Alternative For Beginners

  • Building ProFTPD with SFTP support on Debian Lenny

  • Generate OpenDocument spreadsheets from DB2 (or any other) database

  • How to get the high resolution back for tty after activation of nVidia driver in Ubuntu

  • How to type the new Rupee Symbol in Ubuntu 10.10

  • How to Enable Right | Middle Click On Clickpads – Ubuntu 10.10

  • How to run commands in the background

  • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat screenshots and video Tour

  • How to Enable Right | Middle Click On Clickpads – Ubuntu 10.10

  • ssh public key only login – authentication

  • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On Debian Lenny

  • How to install OpenQRM 4.7 with LXC containers in Debian Squeeze/Lenny

• Wine

  • Wine 1.2.1 Released

    The Wine maintenance release 1.2.1 is now available.

• Games

  • Step Back to the 90s with this Mega Drive Emulator for Ubuntu

    When it comes to Mega Drive emulators that run on Ubuntu, Gens/GS rocks. Gens/GS is a fork of the well known Gens emulator, and over the last several months the author has been cleaning up the source code and adding new features and bug fixes to create an awesome (open source!) emulator.

  • Alien Arena 2011 Is Coming Soon

    We have just received an email from John Diamond, the lead developer of the open-source Alien Arena game, that the Alien Arena 2011 release will be coming this Fall (in North American terms) and we have been told some of the features to be found in this new version.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • A small long post.

    The last few days i decided to start refreshing the mime types of oxygen… started with the large ones that were looking really old by now.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Quick Look: Sabayon Linux 5.4

    I’m left with a very positive impression of Sabayon Linux 5.4. This distro is not as well known as some others, but it really does deserve to be considered by those looking for a more offbeat alternative for their desktop needs. It also puts Gentoo into more people’s hands, and makes it pretty easy to install and manage.

  • eyeOS Web-based Desktop OS

    I’ll be concentrating on my experiences of setting up eyeOS 1.9 rather than the 2.x version that was launched earlier this year. I tried eyeOS 2.x on a couple of different set ups, but I kept running into the serious performance problems that are widely reported on the eyeOS forum by other people who have tried it. The 1.x series also has the advantage of having been considered stable for more than two years.

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core 3.2-rc3

  • ZevenOS-Neptune 1.9 is ready

    We the ZevenOS Team are proud to announce the release of ZevenOS-Neptune 1.9.

    ZevenOS-Neptune is a ZevenOS Distro based fully upon Debian Squeeze, except for a newer kernel and some drivers.
    In this Version we aimed for creating a fast running Live System for USB Sticks. Therefore we developed an easy to use USB Installer aswell as a Persistent Creator that allows you to store changes to your system on your usb stick.
    The Debian software repositories are updating the included software regulary so that you will have a long supported distro.

• Debian Family

  • Preview: Debian 6 “Squeeze” (Part 3: LXDE and Xfce)

    Each review done individually would be rather short, so I’m combining reviews of these two DEs into one post. It shouldn’t turn out to be too long. The other thing is that I didn’t test the installation procedure in either because I suspect it’s the exact same as in GNOME and KDE (and because this current virtual hard drive is messed up GRUB-wise).
    LXDE seems to be the new hot thing; to cater to users who need a lightweight distribution either out of necessity (older hardware, need to allocate as much memory as possible to applications without giving up a usable DE) or out of preference, pretty much every major distribution has begun to offer an LXDE edition. It’s user-friendly but light on resources; it’s well-built yet very modular. It just seems like the place to be.

  • Debian squeezes Chromium back in

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Things To Do After the New Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ Installation

      Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” been released and many people will be eager to grab a copy and install it or upgrade from previous versions of Ubuntu. There are lots of things that you can do that includes customizing and optimizing it to the degree that it is just perfect for your needs.

    • Ubuntu touch screen coming soon in netbooks?

    • Ubuntu 10.10 is Released

    • 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

    • Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat”) Review

    • “Ask Ubuntu” Stack Exchange site out of beta, new awesome domain

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Improves Your Linux Desktop Experience [Screenshot Tour]

      From the install screen to a fully loaded desktop, Ubuntu 10.10 looks nicer and is easier to use than its predecessors. We’ll take a look at our favorite new features in Ubuntu’s newest version, appropriately released on 10/10/10.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat screenshots and video Tour

    • How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meercat

    • Ubuntu 10.10: First Look

    • Canonical Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition review

    • Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat pops out

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Review – Gamer Edition!

      Today, as you will all know, Ubuntu 10.10 is released! You will likely to see many reviews posted all over the net – all saying how great Maverick is, the nice new wallpaper and theme, the fancy new font, and the addition of Shotwell among other things. You are likely to have discovered all this already, so this review is slightly different.

    • What To Do After A Fresh Ubuntu 10.10 Install? Run These Commands!

    • Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) – Various Versions

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Recommendations

      If you’re currently using Windows, you might want to give the open source, flexible, faster and more secure Ubuntu Linux a try (esp. their Netbook edition, specially customized for smaller screens). You don’t need to wipe over your Windows installation or anything. Instead, you can simply set up a “dual boot” system where you have the option to boot into either Windows or Ubuntu on startup.

    • Maverick Meerkat Release Parties in the UK

      A somewhat more civilized and sensible event follows on Tuesday 12th at Fossbox in London, mainly aimed at charities and the voluntary sector, introducing attendees to the Ubuntu desktop.

    • New Ubuntu for desktops adds Windows file integration

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Benchmarks

      For the most part the Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” performance is not hugely different from that of recent Ubuntu Linux releases. However, there are a few areas worth noting, such as with the network performance improving but the disk / EXT4 performance again regressing in a couple areas. The graphics results also continue to be interesting as the open-source drivers mature. Stay tuned for more Ubuntu 10.10 benchmarks across a greater spectrum of hardware.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ Released, Full Review With Screenshots and Videos

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Officially Released

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Linux Mint 10 KDE: User Input

        Linux Mint 10 KDE is now under development as Kubuntu 10.10 is about to be released.
        So now the question goes out to the community, what do you want added, removed or swapped from Mint 9 KDE to Mint 10 KDE?

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Cheap Smart-Phones

    Most of the smart-phones I have seen are not that cheap. People pay up to $1000 for a recent model with good performance/features. That could be changing. MediaTek, an outfit in Taiwan, has been making ARMed devices for a few years and selling them at rock-bottom prices, of the order of $100. One of them caught my eye and upon investigation I found that it had that other OS + Java.

  • Android

    • Logitech launches first Google TV player

      Following months of teasers, Logitech finally launched its Google TV player today at simultaneous press events in New York and San Francisco. The company’s Google TV family includes the Android-based “Review” STB (set-top box), large and mini remote controls, free iPhone and Android remote control apps, and a video cam.

    • 15 Reasons Google TV Will Make a Huge Impact on the Web

      Connected TV isn’t a new concept anymore, but it’s about to get way more interesting, courtesy of Google TV. WebProNews was there for the unveiling of the product at Google I/O back in May, and having seen it in person, I can tell you it’s pretty cool.

    • Rumor Pairs Android Market, PayPal

      Love it or hate it, a huge number of people are more familiar with PayPal than with any other online payment system. And so the Android Market may soon seem more much accessible to them, as a new rumor indicates Google is about to reach a payment-related agreement with eBay.

• Tablets

  • Dixons touts tablets

    First Next, now Dixons. The retaill group’s PC World and Currys stores will next month begin selling – yes, you’ve guessed it – an own-brand 7in Android tablet for the low, low price of £130.

  • OLPC Part 2: Nicholas Negroponte on the Mideast and the XO 3 Tablet—and Why He May Not Ever Have to Build It

    Nicholas Negroponte walked into the Starbucks holding some sort of thin, tablet-like computer. I couldn’t tell what model, because it was zipped inside a carrying case—but I was hoping for a prototype of the XO 3, the next-generation tablet Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Foundation wants to create for children in the developing world for something like $75 per machine.

  • OLPC makes first-world tablet

Blind Inventors Develop Free Software to Enable the Blind to Use Computers

For many blind people, computers are inaccessible. It can cost upwards of $1000 to purchase “screen reader” software, but two blind computer programmers have solved this problem.

Biggest Genome Ever

Now THAT’s a genome. A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome—and the largest genome ever found.

Queensland open source firm doubles staff

The downturn in the US economy has benefitted Queensland open source company Jentla to the extent that it has had to double its staff numbers to meet demand.

[...]

As a result of the demand, Jentla has taken on 20 new staff in the last quarter. The company has offices in Brisbane, its headquarters, Chennai (India) and in Romania. Most of the staff have been recruited in Chennai, at the company’s Tamil Nadu research and development office.

Events

• Diversity, Freedom and Education at the Open World Forum

  This year I have been invited to present the first results of my research about Open public data at the 2010 Open World Forum. Due to the subject of my talk, I was also invited by Glyn Moody to a panel on Open Democracy (see Glyn’s comments on that panel at CWUK).

  I have to confess that I went to the Open World Forum expecting to find some pompous, self-referential, corporate driven marketing show. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and this is what I’ll try to show here. The pounding, rave-style music at the beginning of each session was really depressing. A few talks by some politicians were not among the highest moments of the Forum (Glyn already explained why and I agree with him). This said, the Forum agenda was quite balanced and diverse. Personally I found it an interesting, useful event, one I would have been glad to attend even if I had not had to present my work. The Forum explored many sides of openness, not just the commercial one of Open Source software. Here are just a couple of examples.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • 4 Ways to Supercharge Double-Click Action in Firefox

    Double-clicking (and double tapping) is one of the preferred mouse (or touch pad) actions for me. It’s quick and easy and helps to get things done faster. Sadly, double-clicking is really under-utilized in Firefox.

    The only thing you can do by double-clicking in Firefox is highlighting the word right next to the cursor. Besides that (which is a less-known behavior), if you double-click the 2-3 pixel wide bar just beneath tabs, it opens a new empty tab in the foreground.

  • Mozilla puts Firefox 4 Android beta on crash diet

    The Firefox 4 Android beta is morbidly obese. But Mozilla has a diet plan.

    Over the past twelve hours, after Mozilla released its first Firefox 4 beta for Android, multiple Reg readers have said the browser takes up far too much space on their Googly phones. “Fooking HUGE!!!” said one. “Not even going to waste my time with the beta.”

  • Mozilla upsets net world order with Bing on Firefox

    As Mozilla announced this morning with a blog post, the latest English-language version of Mozilla’s open source browser — due for release in November — will retain Google as the default search engine. But for the first time, Bing will be listed in the pull-down that lets you change the default. Google will be first on the menu. Yahoo! — now powered by Bing — will be second. And Bing will be third.

Oracle

• Oracle Up-selling MySQL

  Oracle is pressuring customers to pay more for enterprise support for MySQL. Those who may make tons of money from servers may feel comfortable with this but this could be a (another) fork in the road for MySQL. To what extent will the features Oracle is plugging in be available in the Free Software versions available to distros? So far, most of the differences are in clustering, management and support which do not affect many users of MySQL as a simple server.

• MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle’s wallet love

BSD

• Ten ways Linux and BSD differ

  People tend to talk about Linux and BSD in the same breath, but a number of telling differences set them apart, says Jack Wallen.

  I hear it all the time: people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs. On occasion, I’ve even done it myself. Of course, there are plenty of similarities. Both are based on Unix and have mostly been developed by non-commercial organisations. They also share a common goal — to create the most useful, reliable operating system available. But there are also significant differences that shouldn’t be ignored, and I thought it would be worth highlighting them here.

Licensing

• HTC Willfully Violates the GPL in T-Mobile’s New G2 Android Phone

  Last week, the hottest new Android-based phone arrived on the doorstep of thousands of expectant T-Mobile customers. What didn’t arrive with the G2 was the source code that runs the heart of the device — a customized Linux kernel. Android has been hailed as an open platform in the midst of other highly locked-down systems, but as it makes its way out of the Google source repository and into devices this vision has repeatedly hit speedbumps. Last year, I blogged about one such issue, and to their credit Google sorted out a solution. This has ultimately been to everyone’s benefit, because the modified versions of the OS have routinely enabled software applications that the stock versions haven’t supported (not to mention improved reliability and speed).

Standards/Consortia

• Generate OpenDocument spreadsheets from DB2 (or any other) database

  DB2 pureXML is IBM software for management of XML data that eliminates much of the work typically involved in the management of XML data.The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an open international standard for office texts, presentations and spreadsheets that is very simple to process or generate automatically. This page is a short synthesis of an article published in September 2010 by N. Subrahmanyam, Using DB2 pureXML and ODF Spreadsheets, to give an idea (see my comments at the end) of how flexible ODF scripting is. Please read the original full article to know how to actually generate ODF documents from DB2 pureXML files.

AMD says it is definitely, really not for sale

Maybe Larry Ellison’s killing of Opteron-based servers from Oracle’s Sun Fire x64 server lineup earlier this year was a love touch instead of a bitchslap for Advanced Micro Devices?

Ex-General Electric boss unleashes bile on HP board

Oracle’s Larry Ellison isn’t the only CEO mouthing off at Hewlett-Packard’s decision to hire Leo Apotheker as the company’s replacement for disgraced former boss Mark Hurd. Now Jack Welch, the ex-chief of General Electric, is sticking the boot in, too.

Flat pay turns IT workers into job seekers

Companies have cut salaries and training, held back on bonuses and piled more work on employees in response to the economic downturn. These tactics may well be pushing many IT professionals to go job hunting, according to Computerworld’s latest salary poll.

Former FTC staffer files a complaint against Google

The complaint was filed on 6 September by Christopher Soghoian, a former technologist at the FTC’s division of privacy and identity protection. Soghoian has decided to take on Google after leaving the agency that should have done it anyway by issuing a complaint alleging that the search engine and advertising outfit shares data with third parties.

Former FTC Employee Files Complaint Over Google Privacy

Google Patent Proposes $2 Fee To Skip Commercials

A day after Google debuted its new Google TV website, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,806,329 to the search giant for its Targeted Video Advertising invention. Among other things, the patent proposes having viewers take 5-10 minutes to ‘fill out a consumer survey and perhaps to provide additional information such as a mailing address survey before starting the program’ to avoid having to watch 10 minutes of commercials. ‘As another alternative,’ the patent continues, ‘the broadcaster may offer the users an option to pay $2 (such as through a micro-payment system, such as GBuy) to exchange for skipping all commercials.’

Las Vegas Review-Journal Endorses The Same Candidate It’s Suing For ‘Stealing’ From Them?

Science

• Boy of 15 fitted with robotic heart

  What do you do when a 15-year-old boy is close to death and ineligible for a heart transplant? If you’re Dr Antonio Amodeo you turn to an artificial solution and transplant a robotic heart giving the boy another 20-25 years of life.

  The Italian boy in question suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy which rapidly degenerates the muscles and eventually leads to death. Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant meaning almost certain death without an alternative solution.

• Mission Complete! WMAP Fires its Thrusters for the Last Time

  The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has, quite literally, changed our view of the Universe. And after nine years of mapping the slight temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, its job is done and NASA has commanded the probe to fire itself into a “graveyard orbit” around the sun.

  Launched in 2001, this ground-breaking spacecraft set out to unravel some of the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology. How old is the Universe? What happened when the Universe was born?

• How nitroglycerine explodes – in slow motion

• Three scientists receive 2010 Chemistry Nobel

  Wednesday, October 6, 2010, saw the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announce the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: It went to three scientists for their work in synthesizing complex carbon molecules; specifically, “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”.

Security

• Gentoo kernel versions and the latest vulerabilities

• Russian authorities detain suspected bank carding kingpin

  The action comes as authorities in Ukraine, the US, and UK last week rounded up dozens of people suspected of participating in bank fraud related to Zeus, a prolific computer trojan that specializes in stealing banking credentials of its victims.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The Government That Cried Wolf

  Speaking as an American who lives in Europe, I feel it is incumbent upon me to describe what people like me do when we hear warnings like the one issued on Sunday by the U.S. State Department and cited above: We do nothing.

• iPhone app tagged as terror tool

• US ex-spook wants ‘rogue states’ banned from Internet

  A FORMER US SPOOK wants all countries in the world to agree to do what America says or be banned from the Internet.

  It is not clear how much the views of the former chief technology officer at the US National Security Agency Dr Prescott Winter reflect those of his mates who still work there.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Solar Panels to Appear on White House in Spring 2011

  Solar panels will be installed on the White House roof a quarter of a century after they were removed by Ronald Reagan, the Obama administration said today.

  A mix of solar thermal and photovoltaic panels will be fitted in spring 2011 to generate hot water and renewable electricity, said Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and energy secretary Steven Chu at a conference on how federal government can green up.

• Tuna Industry “Sustainability” Group Should Act to Save the Tuna!

  ISSF member companies account over 70% of the world’s tuna. The power to shift fishing practices on the water is well and truly in their hands, so Greenpeace
  challenges them to flex their considerable muscle to create positive change. If ISSF is genuinely concerned about transshipment and its role in overfishing and illegal fishing, then it should adopt conservation measures to oblige every one of its members to simply stop buying tuna from fishing companies that engage in tuna transshipment.

• ‘Emission free’ nuclear power is more greenwash

  We’ve discussed before on Nuclear Reaction the nuclear industry’s attempts to greenwash nuclear power by rebranding it ‘clean’. It’s a description of this most contaminating of energy sources that nuclear boosters are pushing more and more in the debate about the future of nuclear power.

  Another term we’re starting to see more and more of is ‘emission free’, as in ‘nuclear power is an emission free energy source’. Take a look at this infographic where the Nuclear Energy Institute (‘the policy organization for the nuclear technologies industry’) portrays nuclear power as such. Even institutions like the BBC have bought the industry spin.

• UPDATE: Climate negotiations from an American girl in China

  Tcktcktck’s Paul Horsman delivers a traditional Chinese stamp to UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres to mark the wall in support of collective action against climate change.

Finance

• China’s recent activities in eurozone to devaluate US dollar

  The market structure of the rates of foreign currencies has been thrown into question. China has become more active in the eurozone as a result of the economic conflict with the USA. The Chinese dragon starts to determine quotations on world’s basic currencies, such as the euro and the US dollar.
  Premier Wen Jiabao of China stated during the meeting with the head of the Greek government George Papandreou that China had purchased long-term bonds, issued by Greece to cover its sovereign debt. Beijing, the Chinese official said, was determined to continue purchasing the bonds if Athens needed new loans to settle its huge budget deficit. Several days before that, the lower house of the US Congress approved the bill targeted against the lowered rate of the Chinese currency vs. the US dollar.

• Fannie Mae logic-bomb saboteur convicted

  A computer contractor has been convicted of planting a logic bomb on the servers of Fannie Mae, the financially troubled US housing and mortgage giant.

  Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, 36, responded to the termination of his two-year-long spell as a software development contractor at Fannie Mae in October 2008 by planting a malicious script designed to wipe all the data from its network on 31 January 2009. Anyone attempting to access data on the system after the logic bomb went off would have received the message “Server Graveyard”.

• Unemployed find old jobs now require more skills

  The jobs crisis has brought an unwelcome discovery for many unemployed Americans: Job openings in their old fields exist. Yet they no longer qualify for them.

  They’re running into a trend that took root during the recession. Companies became more productive by doing more with fewer workers. Some asked staffers to take on a broader array of duties – duties that used to be spread among multiple jobs. Now, someone who hopes to get those jobs must meet the new requirements.

• White House doubts need to halt all foreclosures

  A top White House adviser questioned the need Sunday for a blanket stoppage of all home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about mounting evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners.

• Financial regulators planning worldwide rules for large firms

  International bank regulators are planning a fresh wave of rules for the world’s most important financial companies in an effort to ensure that firms considered “too big to fail” are better protected from collapse – and that taxpayers are insulated from the fallout if they do.

• Govt: No call for Social Security increase in 2011

  As if voters don’t have enough to be angry about this election year, the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an increase in their monthly benefits.

  It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.

• White House Aide Doubts Need to Halt Foreclosures

  A top White House adviser questioned the need on Sunday for a blanket halt to home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about growing evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners.

• Foreclosure freeze could undermine housing market

  Karl Case, the co-creator of a widely watched housing market index, was upbeat three weeks ago. Mulling the economy while at a meeting at a resort near the Berkshires, Case thought the makings of a recovery were finally falling into place.

  “I’m a 60-40 optimist,” he said at the time.

• Why are so many Goldman/Sachs guys working for Obama?

  Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, “as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil.” Gensler said he was sorry — hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Corrupt Akamai worker charged after secrets sting

  An Akamai accounts worker has been arrested for alleged wire fraud. This follows a sting operation during which the man was led to believe he was handing over confidential information to an agent of a unnamed foreign power.

• Hacking the D.C. Internet Voting Pilot

  We found a vulnerability in the way the system processes uploaded ballots. We confirmed the problem using our own test installation of the web application, and found that we could gain the same access privileges as the server application program itself, including read and write access to the encrypted ballots and database.

  The problem, which geeks classify as a “shell-injection vulnerability,” has to do with the ballot upload procedure. When a voter follows the instructions and uploads a completed ballot as a PDF file, the server saves it as a temporary file and encrypts it using a command-line tool called GnuPG. Internally, the server executes the command gpg with the name of this temporary file as a parameter: gpg […] /tmp/stream,28957,0.pdf.

  We realized that although the server replaces the filename with an automatically generated name (“stream,28957,0” in this example), it keeps whatever file extension the voter provided. Instead of a file ending in “.pdf,” we could upload a file with a name that ended in almost any string we wanted, and this string would become part of the command the server executed. By formatting the string in a particular way, we could cause the server to execute commands on our behalf. For example, the filename “ballot.$(sleep 10)pdf” would cause the server to pause for ten seconds (executing the “sleep 10” command) before responding. In effect, this vulnerability allowed us to remotely log in to the server as a privileged user.

• Hackers hijack internet voting system in Washington DC

  An internet voting system designed to allow District of Columbia residents to cast absentee ballots has been put on hold after computer scientists exploited vulnerabilities that would have allowed them to rig elections and view secret data.

  The system, which was paid for in part by a $300,000 federal grant, was hijacked just 36 hours after Washington DC elections officials began testing it ahead of live elections scheduled for next month. Scientists from the University of Michigan pulled off the hack to demonstrate the inherent insecurity of net-based voting.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • A Library Without Walls

    Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

  • On CBC podcasts and CC-licensed music available for commercial use

    On Friday, Michael Geist broke the story that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had apparently banned use of CC-licensed music in its podcasts. This seemed odd, given that the CBC’s Spark podcast has long used, promoted, and done interesting projects with CC-licensed music.

  • Record labels fail to get ‘three strikes’ rule enforced in Ireland

    Four of the world’s largest record companies have failed in an attempt to get the “three strikes” rule enforced against illegal filesharers in Ireland.

    Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI brought the case against UPC, one of Ireland’s largest broadband providers, in order to establish a legal precedent that would force internet service providers to cut off illegal filesharers’ internet connections.

  • ACTA

    • ACTA is worthless without Chinese involvement

      But apparently those behind ACTA thought that they might have been able to get China on board. The fact that they have not has stymied ACTA negotiations, according to people familiar with the situation.

      “Critics say the omission of China from the list – the main source of the world’s counterfeit goods – makes the deal almost worthless, an argument strong refuted by the EU”, reports the EU Observer website.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Linspotting project – Linux video editing workflow ready for action

A full Linux video editing workflow is finally ready for production use. The certified solution is based on Kdenlive plus a set of components which allow easy integration with different sources of video (firewire capture, DVD extraction, H264 transcoding, screen capture, etc). The certification and packaging initiative, which was made possible by years of impressive work from several groups of open source developers, comes from Angulo Sólido, Caixa Mágica and the freelance journalist Caroline Pimenta.

Linux package management is brilliant

Often times when something just works, we tend to take it for granted. I think software package management in Linux is one of those things. It just works. Time and time again I have to help people with packages in Windows, which makes me even more thankful for the solid package management system in Linux. Packages can be installed while software is currently being used, allowing changes to happen when the software is closed and reopened. Packages can also be removed/updated/installed while the user is actively using the computer, with a simple SSH connection to their PC. And, best of all, no rebooting is necessary, unless you are updating the kernel itself, which is pretty rare.

Thank you, Linux! My Windows computer is infected

I used this public computer and saved a file onto my USB drive. Then, because I am accustomed to working without any concern thanks to Linux, I forgot to check the USB contents. When I returned home, I booted my desktop computer in Windows and plugged the infected USB drive.

Since Windows XP has become a little slow, I went for a cup of coffee and, when I returned, my computer was behaving in a way that I had not seen for quite long, yet not one I can call completely unfamiliar. My firewall was flashing alert messages crazily, the antivirus could not be updated, and the system froze on me as I sat dumbfounded. As you can see, THE PENGUIN NUMBED MY WINDOWS SECURITY SENSE!

Emergency Booting Windows PCs: Another Use for Linux

Can there be still more to add to the list of useful functions a live Linux CD offers? This brief article reviews the use of Linux as a means of emergency booting a failed Windows PC and accessing potentially lost files. Linux as a boot OS is fairly common today. For instance, DELL often ships its servers with Windows driver disks that actually use a micro-Linux boot.

However, I discovered another truly invaluable use for Live Linux CDs when my friend Mitch asked me to come over and help him with a very urgent need. His business report was due the next morning, but at the last moment his Microsoft Windows laptop failed to boot and he lost his report.

Switching from Windows to Linux: One Month On

After a while, you soon get used to it, and I can certainly say that Gimp is perfectly adequate for providing the graphics we use on the site every day. When it comes to detailed work on photos, I still prefer to wait until I go home so I can use Photoshop there. It’s going to take me a few more weeks or months before I can handle that …

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 168 – The Brigadier Drops By

  This week on the show: Brigadier Bradshaw joins us as a guest host, we talk to Bradley Kuhn about his move to the Software Freedom Conservancy, Sintel is released, LibreOffice is launched, the FSF turns 25, Microsoft sues Motorola and Canonical announces the Ubuntu One music streaming service.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa’s r600g Driver Test Drive

    There has been alot of talk about the Mesa driver in Linux. One of the new things that has been talked about as the savior of 3d graphics on Linux is the Gallium technology. This technology is supposed to make writing drivers easier and to allow for much more functionality in the Linux 3d stack.

    While I am not a gallium expert, I know enough to build the driver and test it out. So I started with my stock Fedora 13 setup (64bit, Q6600, 8GB RAM). I followed the wiki and installed the Kernel, libdrm, mesa and the ATI driver all from git. It took a little while, but it was reasonable to get going. It really helped that I had built many of these components before when the r600c driver originally came out, so I knew the process.

Applications

• Introducing µTorrent for Linux

  If you’ve ever looked into the various programs available to download via bittorrent, you will probably have discovered µtorrent. Back then it was probably already tiny and full-featured at the same time. It even had customizations to better run inside WINE. But it didn’t run natively on Linux. Of course that made the very low resource bittorrent client much more resource hungry. Now this all changed. (Screenshots inside)

• Key-Mon Shows Live Keyboard and Mouse Strokes for Teaching and Screencasts

  Key-Mon is a small but handy application for Ubuntu that shows keypresses and mouse clicks in real time while you do your work. The application can be useful for teaching or making screencats.

• Proprietary

  • Opera 10.63 Release Candidate 2

    This is the second release candidate for Opera 10.63.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Sign emails with OpenDkim + Postfix + Ubuntu 10.04 x64

  • Byobu: Like Screen, but Better

  • A Look Inside MySQL Enterprise Monitor

  • Policy Routing with Linux

  • Use Your Favorite Font on Your Website with CSS Web Fonts

  • Socket Statistics on Linux

  • RT2870 Linux Driver On Ubuntu 10.04

  • Use an old digital camera, gphoto2, and WordPress for automatic photo blogging

  • Getting Started With Apache Tomcat 7

  • Two Top Tools for Cracking the PDF Nut

  • PLEAC: Code Cookbooks in (Almost) Any Language

  • setting touchpad in gnome on gentoo (including using synclient TouchpadOff to disable it)

  • How To: Killing a zombie process

  • How To: download or upload recursively using command line FTP

  • [How To]: Execute Multiple Commands in Terminal

  • MAC Address on Linuxf

  • Real-time Sunlight Wallpaper

• Games

  • Brand new Penguspy makes it easier to find great Linux games

  • Panasonic Jungle, a Portable Linux-based MMORPG Console

    Although details of the Panasonic Jungle’s specifications and features are not yet released, several credible sources have told us that it will run Linux. The device is said to be cloud-centric, and aside from online gaming, it may include features for video content creation. The only game that is said to be onboard at the moment is Battlestar Galactica Online.

  • Update 1.0.1 – October 04 2010 – Amnesia: The Dark Descent Linux

    This update should work with all Amnesia releases that uses our serial system.

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent Linux Update 1.0.1

Desktop Environments

• Ubuntu 10.04 E17 LiveDVD

  The Enlightenment foundation libraries (EFL) recently reached beta status after having been marked as alpha software for a decade. If you are unfamiliar with what EFL are, they can be summed up in a single quote from their front page:

  “Enlightenment is not just a window manager for Linux/X11 and others, but also a whole suite of libraries to help you create beautiful user interfaces”

• GNOME Desktop

  • dots: a Braille translator for GNOME

    You can configure the output (cells per line, lines per page, etc…) and select the translation table. Also it presents the document on the screen in ASCII representation of using a Braille font with a review line. All the low level transcription is done using liblouis and liblouisxml libraries (the same that orca uses for the braille output). Also another nice feature is that you can actually edit the translation table with a nice UI. All the code is hosted on GNOME git: browse dots source code.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Simply Mepis 8.5 challenge: the first four days

    To sum up, my experience as a Mandriva user handling Mepis is satisfactory up to this point. SimplyMepis is not simply a disappointment. I think that it rivals Mandriva in its KDE handling…maybe a simplified experience than the one I am used to with Mandriva, but Mepis had given me little to complain about.

  • Preview: Debian 6 “Squeeze” (Part 2: KDE)

    there’s nothing show-stopping in either version for me to definitely recommend one over the other.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Officially Released

      Ladies and gentlemen, dear Ubuntu users, after three alphas, one beta and a release candidate, we are pleased to announce that Ubuntu 10.10 is here, today (October 10th), available on mirrors worldwide (see the download links at the end of the article).

    • Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Has Been Released – See What’s New In Both Desktop And Netbook Editions

      Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat final has just been released. I’m taking this opportunity to review the major changes (mostly on the UI) in both Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop and Netbook editions. If you’re a regular WebUpd8 reader, you should already know all these changes but even so, read on for a new Unity video (recorded today) as well as a recap of the changes to Ubuntu Software Center, Unity and so on.

    • 10.10 10:10:10 – thank you and Happy Maverick Day!

      I spent a lot of time observing our community, this release. For some reason I was curious to see how our teams work together, what the dynamic is, how they work and play together, how they celebrate and sadly, also how they mourn. So I spent a fair amount more time this cycle reading lists from various Ubuntu teams, reading minutes from governance meetings for our various councils, watching IRC channels without participating, just to get a finger on the pulse.

    • Ubuntu One and FOSS Services

      My good friend S.Gerguri asked me to talk about the nature of the Ubuntu One services offered by Canonical Ltd. and has sent me his thoughts by email, I’ve quoted him here and responded with my own thoughts. Full disclosure: I briefly worked on the team that develops the Ubuntu One service at Canonical and so I’m going to be careful since I’ve seen code and talked about strategy while on the team.

    • Wikinews interviews Ubuntu developer Fabrice

      The 10.10 version of Ubuntu (codename Maverick Merkaat), a free operative system is to be released in the next few days. French Wikinews contributor Savant-fou (Baptiste) has interviewed Fabrice (fabrice_sp on Ubuntu), an Ubuntu’s MOTU (Master Of The Universe), member of the development team of the operative system.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 beta review

      Ubuntu has long been the Linux distribution favoured by businesses wanting to make a hassle-free switch from Windows, and the full release of the latest version, Ubuntu 10.10, is due this coming Sunday (October 10). In this review, we’ll be looking at the beta release of Ubuntu 10.10.

      Version 10.04 of Ubuntu arrived earlier this year and was an LTS (long term support) release, which means it benefits from three years of support for the desktop version; the server edition gets five years. This latest version, however, is a standard release and only gets security updates for 18 months.

    • We’re moving!

      As most of you who follow the Fridge know, Ubuntu has been given a face-lift. There is a cool new theme with new colors, a lighter feel, and just all around an upbeat tone to all the official Ubuntu related sites. Check out ubuntu.com and canonical.com to see the new look if you haven’t done so already.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • HD Video Android 2.2 myTouch Coming to T-Mobile

      T-Mobile today expands its myTouch line with a new Android 2.2 handset from HTC that sports a speedier processor than initial models as well as a front-facing camera for video calls, a larger screen and support for the carrier’s HSPA+ network, which offers 4G-like performance.

    • Android phones push cameras to 14 megapixels

      Japanese carrier KDDI announced a November release for a new 3.5-inch, Snapdragon-based “ISO3″ Android 2.1 phone from Sharp, touted for its 960 x 640 display and 9.6-megapixel camera. Meanwhile, Altek offered more details on its previously tipped 3.2-inch “Leo” Android phone — including an unprecedented 14-megapixel camera — and said it will ship in Europe in the first quarter of 2011.

    • Taking Care of Business with 12 Great Android Apps for Enterprise Users

      While Android smartphones were initially targeted at the consumer market, with the release of Froyo/Android 2.2, they’re increasingly making their way into the enterprise — and several Android applications are now available that are specifically designed to meet business users’ needs, covering everything from document scanning to task management.

      Although many of these Froyo apps are free, remember that you can uninstall any paid Android app within 24 hours of your initial purchase for a full refund — so go ahead and try any of the below, with no commitment.

What Do You Believe In?

I believe in giving users software ownership, that no matter how much or how little they paid for software that they should have complete ownership and control over their own computers. They should have source code, they should be able to modify it or pay others to modify it for them, they should be able to redistribute and learn from it without strings, restrictions or end user agreements.

Designed not to scale

With the aim of bringing in one new contributor, Máirín Duffy sometimes writes a “Fedora Design Bounty”, a long description of something she could do herself.

Look at the first one and you’ll get a sense of the process she underwent. She created a splashy web page and discussed a specific issue at length (rather than simply linking to a ticket). She singled out a specific task for a newcomer and provided context showing why it was important that the work gets done. In the “What’s in it for you?” section, she explained how you’ll totally be cooler if you do it. Finally, she made it a contest: anyone can try working on it for 48 hours, and if they don’t succeed, the next person in line gets a shot.

Education

• Linux ,schools and zeitgeist

  By accepting that the Zeitgeist that propels the desirable is an unreliable indicator of worth and that as ICT moves outside this realm an opportunity is created for its dissection into its constituent parts and inclusion into the fabric of school subjects.

  In other words computing is old and boring enough to have earned its place in the mainstream curriculum.

Project Releases

• Project News for PLplot

  This is a development release of PLplot. It represents the ongoing efforts of the community to improve the PLplot plotting package. Development releases in the 5.9.x series will be available every few months. The next full release will be 5.10.0.

• LM_Sensors 3.2.0 Has Been Released

  It’s been quite a while since having anything to report on with the LM_Sensors project, which is the free software project to provide user-space utilities and kernel drivers for various hardware sensors to be supported under Linux. LM_Sensors makes it possible to monitor the CPU/system temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, and other metrics for many systems and motherboards. The last time though we brought up LM_Sensors was in May when it received some better Intel CPU support, but the last major release (LM_Sensors 3.1.0) happened in March of 2009. Today though, LM_Sensors 3.2.0 has been released.

Programming

• C++ Snippets on Linux: Vectors Vice Arrays As a Better Way to Store Data

  You may have read and enjoyed my recent article “C++ Snippets: Converting Hexidecimal Values to Decimal Values.” In that article, I briefly discussed a secret project that I have undertaken that will eventually result in my first GUI application for GNU/Linux, Windows, and perhaps even MacOS. At that time, I said that I could not reveal the exact nature of the program. I still cannot reveal the exact nature of the program, but I am releasing more of the source code under the GNU GPL license version 3. If you look at this code, run and compile it, you may glean a few more hints as to what kind of program I am actually aiming to write. in this article, I will reveal a few more details as to how I came up with this program idea.

What we’re driving at

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Does the market need freedom, or is it modern sharecropping?

Thorne gave another example: An industrial designer in Berlin who has been financially successful using open licenses. As a result, he’s often asked what the business model around this is. Despite his financial success and critical acclaim, he admits that it’s the creative freedom that has real value. He had tenure, etc., but some people undervalue the importance of the creativity result of the freedom as opposed to the monetary returns.

Health/Nutrition

• MSF launches attack on European Commission for blocking cheap drugs

  The EC is seeking a trade agreement with India which will restrict its generic companies from making cheap copycat drugs for poor countries, says MSF, which launches a campaign to oppose this and other allegedly restrictive EC practices today

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain

  A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Conservationists row over ship hit by Japanese whaling vessel

  It was the moment a cat and mouse game between a Japanese whaler and a team of determined marine conservationists burst into chilling violence. In early January in the icy waters off Antarctica, the steel hull of the Okinawa-registered ship Shonan Maru II ploughed into a lightweight carbon-fibre pursuit vessel used by the anti-whaling charity Sea Shepherd, shearing off the sleeping quarters.

• Rich nations ‘slow to start climate aid flow’

  Rich countries have been slow to launch the “fast start” climate funds promised at Copenhagen, the world’s least developed nations complained today as negotiators wrestled with a finance package to keep the UN climate talks process on track.

  World leaders agreed last year to inject $30bn (£19bn) into forestry and other efforts to tackle climate change between 2010 and 2012. Ahead of bigger, more long-term financing, the “fast-start” money was designed to build trust among poorer countries that produce very miniscule greenhouse gas emissions but suffer many of the worst consequences.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Corporate Censorship Kills Creative Innovation

  I recently twittered “Corporate censorship kills creative innovation because some great ideas aren’t seen as great until much later” but some people were confused, which isn’t surprising given that I could have fully explained what I meant if I’d just used all 140 characters.

  So to clarify, I’ll do a full post but due to how I have MySQL set up, I’ll need to keep to under two billion characters. Hopefully that will be enough this time.

  When I was talking about “Corporate Censorship”, I wasn’t talking about the relationship between a game developer and a publisher. That’s a unique relationship because one party (the publisher/employer) is paying the other party (the developer/employee) and I do think if you’re funding something, you do have the right to exert some control over what is being made. You are paying for it after all. In a good and healthy publisher/developer relationship both parties respect what the other brings to the venture and they let the other do what they do best with minmal interference, but that’s not what I was talking about.

• Ninth Case Filed against Turkish Journalist Ismail Saymaz

  Turkish reporter Ismail Saymaz faces 79 years in prison due to the publication of critical articles for the Turkish daily newspaper Radikal, IPI’s National Committee in Turkey reports.

  Saymaz, accused of “violating the secrecy of an investigation” in relation to the Ergenekon trials and events in the city of Erzincan, has previously been charged with no less than eight other criminal cases. The eighth trial opened up against him on account of his article titled, “Love games in Ergenekon – The Ergenekon prosecutor also took the judge’s statement,” published on 8 June.

• Pixel Light

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Scientific American appalled at US broadband, demands line-sharing

  Scientific American might be a bit late to the controversy over line-sharing and broadband competition in the US, but the magazine today released a sharp (and unfortunately short) editorial intent on making up for lost time. Called “Why Broadband Service in the US is so Awful,” the piece argues that ISPs need to open their networks to third-party competitors. As for politicians who don’t see things this way, they “have aligned themselves with large Internet providers such as AT&T and Comcast that stand to suffer when their local monopolies are broken.”

  The editorial appears in the October 2010 issue of the magazine and showed up online today. It breaks no new ground, instead citing the “recent” FCC-commissioned report from Harvard’s Berkman Center, the one arguing that most developed countries have more broadband competition thanks to their line-sharing rules.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Sintel: An Epic Open-Source Movie

    On October first, the open-source movie project of the Blender Foundation released third animated short on YouTube: Sintel. Five days later, the movie had already reached one million views. Previously released only at the Netherlands film festival (on September 27), Sintel’s success is as much due to its quality than it’s open-source nature.

  • Anti-piracy lawyers caught pirating each other’s work

    We would like to think that the lawyers that are prosecuting alleged copyright infringers are practicing what they preach, but it looks like one of the most high profile firms involved in such cases are just as guilty of stealing other’s work as those who are downloading illegal media.

  • White House IP Boss: Digital Piracy Costs U.S. Jobs

    “Protection of our innovation and protection of our creativity is an essential part of our plan for economic recovery,” U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said in a keynote address here at a policy conference hosted by the Future of Music Coalition.

    [...]

    In June, Espinel, joined by Vice President Joe Biden and other top administration officials, released an ambitious strategy charting a course of action to bolster IP protection and tighten enforcement. That plan contained recommendations on a variety of fronts, and Espinel said today that the administration is “moving forward quite rapidly” to put it in place.